‘We can take your name out of the piece.’ I pressed STOP.
Leo watched the steam rising from his coffee cup. He ran a hand over his scalp. ‘Look, I mean, in Poza Rica, the streets know things before you know them.’ His voice was dull. ‘Plus, you know, you foreign journalists have been camped out in Mexico since I was a teenager, and nothing’s changed.’ His eyes rested on the coffee in his cup. He shrugged. ‘But hey, what can you do. When you see Armando, you’ll see what silence does to a person. I don’t want that for me.’
‘Thanks, Leo.’ I slid the voice recorder back into my pocket and the notebook into my bag. ‘I’ll be in touch.’
‘It’s OK.’ Leo walked me to the door. ‘Tell Armando I said hello.’
The night had that clean pepper nip of wet hedges. Between the gaps in the cobbles the light glowed yellow as melted solder. Outside, Leo slung his leg over his Honda 450, shook my hand, and then he was gone, roaring away into the dark.
16
Next morning, I headed to the breakfast place Dominic had chosen – crumbling pink Art Deco stucco on the outside, winking cutlery on the inside. He was sitting on the terrace at a wrought-iron table, beside a terrapin pond, the screen of banana leaves around his table half see-through with sunlight. When he saw me, he gave up trying to flag down a waiter for a refill and stood up to shake my hand. Concha pastry crumbs littered his saucer. His glass of jugo verde was half empty.
‘Shit, you’ve been waiting ages,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. Traffic.’ I pulled out a chair.
‘No trouble, old soldier,’ he said. ‘Not the best time of day to cross the city.’ His eyes were pouchy from working all night, in that seasick time zone where breakfast is dinner and your head starts to ache like evening just as it’s getting bright.
A copy of Proceso lay on the table. On the cover was Carlos’ byline photo.
‘I’m truly sorry for your loss, Andrew,’ said Dominic.
‘Yeah.’ From the magazine I lifted my eyes to the terrapins kicking through the pond near our table. ‘Strange to see it all written down like that.’
Dominic made a face like he’d pulled a muscle. ‘I wouldn’t read that, if I were you. Toxicology report came out, and the prosecutor has made hay out of Carlos’ – ah, leisure activities.’
‘Classic behaviour.’
A slim young waiter handed me a menu.
‘Mind if I smoke?’ I asked.
Dominic sipped his jugo verde.
‘I’d prefer if you fortified yourself,’ said Dominic. ‘When my old man died, my appetite died with it. Looked like a ghost for days. Had to force the food down in the end. Had to tell myself I could eat a nun’s arse through a tennis racket.’ He shrugged. ‘Eventually felt like I could.’
‘Actually, I probably could eat a nun’s arse through a tennis racket.’ I opened the menu.
‘That’s the spirit. Get what you want. This is on the Baron’s dime.’
The Baron – his name for his agency, founded by a rich German in the nineteenth century.
At the next table sat a young couple, a man and a woman, wealthy types – ‘mirreyes’ we called them, the kind of people who wore padded designer waistcoats over their chinos; who never wanted to hear about the news; who took about an hour to complete a single vowel.
Looking at the menu, at the two-hundred-peso eggs and fifty-peso juices, what I wanted to say was, ‘I’m glad the Baron’s getting this.’
What I said was, ‘I’ll have what you’re having,’ and shut the menu.
‘Very good.’ Dominic flagged down a waiter to order two plates of chilaquiles.
‘With two eggs,’ he said, ‘on this guy’s. That’s very important.’
The waiter laughed, handed us our coffees. ‘Very good, sirs.’
Dominic thumbed open a bolillo loaf and handed me the bread basket, then lifted the copy of Proceso to pull out a typescript hooped and flecked with red pen.
‘That’s a lot of red,’ I said.
Dominic turned the pages. ‘You know me. There’s always a lot of red. But it’s solid. No holes. Nice colour, too – I like the refinery chimney disguised with plastic palm fronds.’
‘Bit florid, I thought.’ My eyes were on the happy couple, who were trying to pick the right angle for a selfie in front of a large bird-of-paradise flower growing by the pond. Dewdrops hung from the flower’s purple and orange petals. Me and Carlos, we’d taken our fair share of selfies, sure, but never in places like this. Our last post had been a shot of us on the worst beach in the world, just outside Coatzacoalcos, a slick of oil-killed mackerel behind us, our faces wild with fake joy.
‘No, but it fits.’ Dominic put down the typescript. ‘All of it. And that’s why our phone call pulled the rug out from under me a tad, old soldier.’
The food arrived, plates heaped with fried corn chips in green tomato sauce, topped with cream, white cheese, fried eggs, refried beans on top.
‘You weren’t lying about “fortify yourself”,’ I said. ‘Enough for a food coma.’
‘Conveniently,’ said Dominic, stabbing an egg yolk. ‘I had a sleep pencilled in for after breakfast.’ He looked at me. ‘Notice I said “had”.’
‘Yeah, all right,’ I said, wadding down the food before my stomach turned again. ‘I’m sorry to pull the rug out from under you. But I have a new angle.’
His fork stopped halfway to his mouth. ‘Go on. And don’t mention the fracking thing. You have it here, and it’s a rabbit hole. The Baron isn’t going to care. Corporate malpractice in Mexico is old hat.’
‘That missing student isn’t old hat.’
On the bank of the pond, terrapins clambered over one another, blunt dinosaur heads clashing.
Dominic clicked his tongue. ‘It’s sad, certainly. But what’s he got to do with oil companies?’
‘Me and Carlos found his body.’ I sat back, flicking ash. ‘We were driving back. Stumbled on him. Watched some cops take his body away.’
Dominic’s eyes didn’t move from mine. ‘You’re serious?’
‘That’s why Carlos stayed. He found out what happened. Seems to have spread the word, because, later that day, a protest broke out. Zetas in cop uniforms were right there, machetes out, swinging them at kids. Carlos got photos.’
Dominic scratched his chin. ‘The problem is photos on their own won’t do.’ His nine o’clock shadow rasped. ‘We need testimonies.’
‘Got one last night,’ I said. ‘A driller saw bodies being disposed of at Ajenjo sites, with known narcos in police uniforms giving him the orders. One of them was at the protest Carlos took photos of.’
Dominic’s eyebrows went up. ‘Can you corroborate it?’
In the pond, two terrapins cruised through underwater gloom. My leg was jigging under the table and the space under my ribs was all cold white electricity.
‘Got the name of a witness down in Coatzintla.’
‘Means a return trip,’ Dominic said through a sigh, swabbing up egg yolk with a torn-off hunk of bolillo. ‘Means a budget request from the Baron. A fixer’s fee.’ He chewed slowly, swallowed. You could nearly hear him twisting the information around in his head, kinking the arguments, gauging their strength. ‘And you definitely have sources on the ground?’
‘Got an itinerary.’ I flipped open my notebook to show him.
‘When would all this be?’
‘Today, ideally,’ I said.
‘Thought as much.’ Dominic drained his jugo verde and leaned back against the chair, his eyes were on the terrapins. ‘Go for it.’
A chunk of ash fell from my cigarette.
Carlos, if you get this, we’ve got this story.
Dominic stuffed money into the little wicker basket that our bill had arrived in. ‘It’s worth drilling into, if you’ll forgive the pun. Pack a bag.’ He counted on his fingers. ‘Do the city again, nice and fine-grained, focusing on why those whistle-blowers go in the grinder.’ Dominic was tapping his middle finger now. ‘Now, the Holy Grail
. Americans sold Ajenjo the drilling gear, yes? So, if you can prove Ajenjo’s CEO knows what’s happening on his watch – or is even, shall we say, encouraging such things to happen on his watch – then we have US multinationals making some of their profits, in part because of death squads.’ He shrugged. ‘Unwittingly, of course.’
‘Sure.’
Dominic scratched his chin. ‘Look, end result of it all is you might need to move country – but you’d have a hell of a story.’
‘I see no downside to this.’
‘Well, yes.’ Dominic frowned at the place where the money had been, rapping the table with his knuckles. He folded his napkin onto the clean plate. ‘Now, I think it’s time I hit the hay.’
We got up from the table. The couple – they’d finished their selfie – went to cross the terrace. Now me and Dominic had to wait for them to finish up their kiss before we could pass. Back outside the front of the restaurant, I lit a cigarette.
‘Thanks, Dominic,’ I said. ‘Really.’
‘A pleasure.’ He was polishing his glasses on his Blue Cheer T-shirt. ‘Good luck, old soldier.’ He set off the other way, under the canopy of ferns and palms and cypress above the walkway that spined Avenida Amsterdam.
The viene-viene sitting by the entrance to the parking lot was reading El Universal. Page one showed Carlos’ mother on the crematorium steps, staring into the silver ripple of flashing cameras, beside the A2 photo of Carlos.
Driving home, passing a newsstand, its metal lattice clothes-pegged with copies of Reforma and Proceso, Carlos’ face looked down at me in multiple, rippling in the draught of passing cars.
‘Looking good.’ I flicked ash. ‘But I’d sooner you make page one with, you know, photos by you, not photos of you.’
Carlos’ face looked down from a copy of El Metro that lay on the dashboard of a bus driving beside my jeep along Nuevo León.
‘But, then again, who wouldn’t.’
At a quesadilla stand on Baja California, the vendor was using a crumpled-up page one of La Razón to dry her hotplate. Carlos’ face wrapped her knuckles.
17
You travel as often as I used to, you never really unpack.
You have your iPad and your laptop and your camera and your spare camera and a whole lot of blister plasters.
You have six days’ worth of clothes: mostly comfortable, mostly weatherproof, but also a pair of slacks that could pass for neat, a shirt that could pass for formal, a tub of boot polish, a brush.
That’s why I never owned a washing machine: even a three-hundred-peso hotel will do your laundry for you if you’re nice about it.
You have a long-sleeve shirt for dry heat, a Hawaiian shirt for wet heat.
You have a jumper and a leather jacket against outdoor cold, but mostly against shitty-hotel cold.
Meaning that when I got home, the packing took all of six seconds, leaving me time to book a hotel in a tourist town outside Poza Rica, book a meet-up with Francisco Escárcega, and get back on the road.
Before leaving the city I stopped for a coffee at the Teatro de los Insurgentes, lit up white against the midnight dark, leaning against the bonnet of my jeep, smoking cigarettes, my flask of LSD and water turning the view into Carlos’ first day in Mexico City, when I’d taken him to the university campus for a walk and a joint, before making our way to the theatre murals.
Towers loomed high above us, their black glass fronts shining like iPhones.
‘When I was a kid,’ I said, pointing at the mural above the doors to the theatre, ‘I used to look at photos of this place. My grandad had all these old encyclopaedias, with this like properly ’70s colour palette on the pictures inside.’
At the centre of the smoke and fumes and scarlet drapes hung an opera mask decorated with a sun and a moon. Red-nailed fingers held that mask up above a space of fire where revolutionaries and emperors and Aztec duchesses twisted like dancers.
A gentle rain fell through the light, the fine white drops chased by the draughts of passing cars into the shapes mackerel form when threatened. Carlos shivered in his jacket.
I pointed. ‘The sky in the background had this powder-blue tint that made everything look like morning.’
‘You mean you found the only scrap of blue sky in Mexico City?’ Carlos’ voice was fake-amazed. He pointed. ‘Love that Devil in the corner. So sleepy. So hungry.’
‘He’s really good,’ I said. ‘But I’m all about that blue. Used to sit at the back of class, stare up out of the window, watch planes cut through the sky, and wish they were lifting me all the way here. And then, years later, I did wind up here. Landed on the rainiest, greyest, most hungover Sunday morning in the history of life. But the trees, they were rinsed green, and their shine was as glossy as the ones in that mural. All I had was two hundred words of Spanish, two hundred dollars in my wallet, and the address of some room the school had found for me, and so I showed the taxi driver the address on my phone.’ I pointed with my cigarette. ‘And he dropped me off at a house two blocks behind the mural. That picture, the one I’d always had in my head, suddenly I was living right around the corner from it. All day, every day, bouncing around town, underground on the Metro, through every traffic jam on every shitty bus, teaching English to nobody whose name I can remember, I’d carry that picture in my head, all the way back home to the stupid peeled Corona chair on my terrace, and I’d sit there with a book and a pack of smokes, looking up at that mural, home at last.’ The long drag I took on my cigarette was one of those perfect drags that make your body feel like it’s going to scatter in a rush of atoms.
Carlos nodded like he’d barely heard, looking at his cigarette. ‘Shit, my head hurts. All those weird drinks we had, vato, I swear.’
‘Which ones?’
‘The Elvis Presley,’ said Carlos. ‘That was the first of your corruptions.’
‘All you had in your hotel room was Xanax and whiskey.’
‘That’s not true,’ said Carlos, and dunted me with his shoulder. ‘We had vitamin C tablets as well. That’s how we made the Enola Gays.’
I shuddered. ‘The second night, what was it we were drinking?’
‘Thom Gunns.’ He bared his teeth like his head still hurt, tendons cabling in his neck. ‘Cognac and speed. Did any of them actually taste good?’
‘I’d give the Thai Orchids a solid seven out of ten.’
‘What were they?’
‘Jameson and coconut milk. After a stripclub near my university.’
‘You had a stripclub near your university?’
‘And a methadone clinic. I used to work there.’
‘The stripclub?’
‘The clinic, you bastard.’
‘Huh.’ He leaned forward and spat deliberately into the curb. ‘Jesus,’ he said, peering at the clot of phlegm. ‘Look at that Chernobyl green. I’m ruined.’ His shoulders folded in around his body like wings. He pushed his hair back from his eyes, shaking his head, his face turned towards me.
Except, now, in the memory, trying to call up his face, all I could see was his smushed nose, his kinked and broken fingers.
‘Hell of a trip, all this.’ He gestured vaguely.
Now, in the memory, his shirt was holed with two star-shaped burns. The whites of his lost-kid eyes brimmed with red.
Petechial haemorrhaging, Teresa had told me.
‘You’ll be OK, man,’ I said.
Even in the memory, my hands under his shirt didn’t run over his tattoos – the two swallows below his ribs, the black-letter curve of the nickname ‘Flacucho’ over his stomach – but over a ‘Y’ of autopsy sutures.
He looked at me steadily. Smoke crinkled out from the holes in his chest. Then he laughed. It sounded like a cough. ‘You sure?’
Between third and fourth rib on the right side, fatally puncturing a lung.
‘Positive,’ I said, even though I wasn’t. ‘Come here.’
Between fifth and sixth rib on the left side, destroying the heart completel
y.
Against my throat, my lips, my tongue, I felt his smashed teeth, tasted his pulped lips. His throat wore a scarlet collar of bruises.
A reverse chokehold, Teresa had told me, fractured the hyoid bone.
Back in real life my eyes stung and blurred and my knuckles whitened around the doughnut bag, alone outside the mural, smoke unfurling from my lips. The people who’d killed him hadn’t just taken the man: they’d taken my memories of him, too, Carlos moving into my arms in that hotel room in El Paso, Carlos slamming to the floor of that Poza Rica alley, Carlos on the mortuary trolley rattling down the apartment steps.
Then I balled up the half-eaten doughnut in its bag and stuffed it into the door and slammed the jeep shut behind me. After that I ate at a sad blue diner on the edge of the city then hit the fog-shrouded highway, heading east.
18
The poolside terrace of the Hotel El Tajín was loud with a mixed group of teenagers blasting cumbia and ranchera songs on their phones. They wore counterfeit Ralph Lauren swimsuits and fake Ray-Ban glasses and their flirting consisted mostly of yells and shoves. Francisco Escárcega sat at the far end of the pool, in the shade beside the bar, looking like his Opinión de Poza Rica byline photo: slim, dark, and with a sceptical, acne-pitted face.
‘Good choice,’ I said to Francisco as a girl ran screeching across my path to escape a boy who’d charged from his room after her. ‘No one will hear a thing. Not even us.’
Francisco shielded his tamarind juice flung up by the spray of the two teenagers hitting the water one after the other, then shook my hand. ‘Sorry, Andrew. Summer holidays. How was your drive?’
The front page of the paper at his elbow showed how a Poza Rica nightclub shooting had left four bodies twisted in a pool of Coca-Cola, grape soda, and syrup-thick head blood.
‘Hard place to get to, Papantla,’ I said, raising my voice over the teenagers, who had bobbed up, yelling. ‘Lot of twists and turns.’
‘We’re pretty cut off here,’ Francisco said. ‘Island without a sea.’ Then he tsked. ‘I was sorry to hear about your friend. Brave guy.’ He gave a chin-jut. ‘Saw him at the protest.’
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